Labour Day

Labour Day

Mark Wegierski returns to class

In Canada and the United States, the holiday honouring workers and the union movement is celebrated on the first Monday of September, as Labour Day, to avoid the radical connotations of May Day. In some parts of Europe, by contrast, May Day is still celebrated with enthusiasm by socialist and far left parties who share in the idealism of earlier, nineteenth-century workers’ struggles. However, relations between “the progressive intelligentsia” and the proletariat have always been problematic. Even leaving aside the excesses of Soviet Communism (and its various offshoots), the record of Western “progressive” intellectuals with regard to real workers has been questionable at best.

The valuations of the various social classes required by Marxism were, to a large extent, arbitrary. For instance, the “petit bourgeois” (the lower middle-class) were utterly despised, even though they often had to live a hardscrabble existence, and despite the fact that many in the intelligentsia themselves came from well-to-do backgrounds. Moreover, when confronted by the social conservatism of much of the proletariat, left-wing intellectuals fell back on the concept of “false consciousness” and the notion of what Marx had derisively termed the lumpenproletariat (the lowest substratum of society, especially criminals and vagrants). The 1960s generally, and in particular the thought of the psychiatrist and anti-colonialist intellectual Frantz Fanon, marked the repudiation of the “embourgeoised” proletariat in favour of what mainstream Marxism would simply have called the lumpen.

The classical Marxist categories, however, may have some residual usefulness in explaining what really was going on in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. What Marxism termed the petit bourgeoisie and the proletariat are arguably the socially conservative core of the country today, regardless of formal party affiliations. To extend the argument made in James Burnham’s political classic The Managerial Revolution (1941), the haute bourgeoisie (upper class) – with a few exceptions – has morphed into the managerial New Class, which today includes the super-rich, sports and media celebrities and high-ranking bureaucrats and social experts. This New Class has allied with and adopted elements of the lumpenproletariat’s “countercultural” lifestyles, in a direct affront to the more traditional morality of the middle and working classes. This precipitous behavioural shift among most of the upper class was aptly termed “the revolt of the elites” by the eminent social critic Christopher Lasch, in his 1995 book of the same name.

Political analyst Kevin Phillips argued in the 1960s that the winning combination in American politics was “social conservatism plus economic liberalism” or the acceptance by conservatives of the welfare state. Roosevelt’s New Deal appealed, rhetorically at least, to Americans’ sense of decency and was depicted as the only way out of the Great Depression. Conservatives of that day had appeared to trap themselves in what seemed like a rhetorically difficult defense of economic privilege and a foundering laissez-faire capitalism. The New Deal strategy of class-war rhetoric has been a continuing staple of Democratic Party appeals to American voters ever since.

Ironically, however, beginning in the 1980s, much of the Republican Party’s appeal came to be based on a formula of social liberalism plus economic conservatism. The “yuppies” of the 1980s, for example, were typically fiscally conservative and socially liberal. George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” may have been a hopeful-sounding term, but in practice it also has tended to leave socially liberal policies in place.

The results of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, with a massive heartland coloured red, and the urban and coastal areas coloured blue, symbolically supports this type of analysis. The social class that commentator David Brooks calls the Bobos (short for “bourgeois bohemians”) are the core of left-liberalism today, and are centred in big cities. Like most “progressive” intellectuals, including their European predecessors, they regard those who do productive labour as irredeemably backward and imbued with hidebound attitudes. This Labour Day, accordingly, they will not be celebrating actual labourers but a politically correct image of them that has never been reflected in reality. Editorial note; in the UK, likewise, a prevalent theme today is the unremitting evil of populism.

Mark Wegierski is a Toronto-based writer and researcher. An earlier version of this article appeared on the Hudson Institute website

1 Response to Labour Day

The traditional Marxist class analysis refers to ownership of the means of production, the notion of surplus value, and class struggle. The examination of social and cultural power has changed during the past 50 years or so as a result of many factors, including entertainment technology. The “superstructure” has been infiltrated eventually to control the base; Marcuse + Gramsci, in a nutshell. The combination of political with cultural vectors in social change is well illustrated by the LGBT movement.

It is not difficult to trace the agenda-worked trajectory from the US New Left of the 1960s through western institutions and publications, for example, to the UK Equality Act of 2010. Having watched this happen, by direct personal observation and by documentation from the (self-described) “agenda-workers” themselves, it is just a little irritating to see writers like Douglas Murray, Eric Kaufmann and Allison Pearson now describing the process, but better late than never. Given the wealth and power of the new ruling class, the problem is how to reverse the process and recover social health.